Ad of the Day: Google

Stage an email intervention for friends and family still on AOL or Hotmail

Is your mom emotionally attached to the AOL account she created in 1995? Do you have a friend who's convinced that Hotmail is the only mail? Don't worry: Google is here to help.

Google's new "Email Intervention" campaign aims to help Gmail users guide stragglers to the very current email service with a decidedly retro instructional video. Aided by a blackboard, slides, and some smiley-face balloons, "intervention specialist" Dr. Richard Muscat provides a tongue-in-cheek tutorial on how to successfully save your loved ones from email obsolescence. (The actor, John Kovacevich, is an associate creative director at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. But the spot was produced in-house at Google, not by Goodby.)

"We all have that one friend … who still emails you from that embarrassingly out-of-date address," says the doctor, "an address that should be laid to rest with so many items of its time"—like floppy disks or (God forbid) the scrunchy. "Your loved ones are being left out of conversations," Muscat warns, "unable to video-chat or make free calls—and that's sad."

Luckily, Google has made it easy to stage an "email intervention." Just go to emailintervention.com, enter your friend's woefully archaic contact info, and select from a number of customized messages, from "Straightforward: I'm here to help" to "Outraged: You're embarrassing me," depending on how desperate you've gotten.

While it might seem that Google's "email intervention" isn't serious since everyone has Gmail, consider this: Microsoft's Hotmail and Yahoo Mail both still have more users. That intervention might be necessary, after all.